ThetaTracker Pro — User Guide

Welcome

ThetaTracker Pro organizes your options portfolio the way a premium seller actually thinks about it — by department, not by a flat list of positions. Each department is a job: generating weekly income, holding protection, running other income trades, parking long-dated bets.

The methodology behind it is simple and consistent: short puts are income engines that get rolled, not closed; long puts are permanent protection inventory that you finance over time. The app's numbers — roll capture, "Net If Rolled," coverage, "fully paid" — are all built around that approach, which is exactly what generic journals miss.

The departments, and other names you may hear

Different brokers, programs and teams use different words for the same jobs. Here is what each department holds, and some of the other names for it. You can show your own names on the tabs and menus in Settings › Department Names; only the label changes, never your data.

01 Getting Started & Connecting Your Broker

Everything starts by connecting your broker. ThetaTracker reads your positions, balances and trade history from your broker, then lands every position in 📥 New Positions so you can send it to its department.

Your first session

1. Sign in and answer the short setup. Three screens: your trading style; your broker, main underlying, account type and weekly income target; then the connect screen. You can change any answer later in Settings.
2. Connect your broker. Click Connect my broker (or Connect a broker in Manage Accounts). A secure window opens, run by our connection partner SnapTrade. Sign in to your broker there. If nothing opens, allow pop-ups for this site and try again.
3. Close the window and press 🔄 Sync. Your positions and balances load. A newly linked brokerage can take a few minutes to show its accounts, so press Sync again if the list is empty.
4. Route each position in 📥 New Positions, once. The journal remembers where each one goes.

Every day after that

• The journal refreshes your positions in the background.
• Press 🔄 Sync when you want the newest numbers or you have just traded. Only a manual Sync picks up today's fills.
• Your trade history comes in with Sync. There is no file to export or import (see Your Trade History).

Which brokers connect

• tastytrade connects through the same Connect my broker button. An optional direct tastytrade link (Settings) adds same-day fills and history.
• Schwab (thinkorswim), Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE and others connect through SnapTrade.

Where positions go

• Every position lands in 📥 New Positions. Nothing is filed automatically, so the journal never guesses.
• You route each position once. That choice is remembered on every later sync (see New Positions & Routing).
• Syncing again is safe. It refreshes marks, Greeks and routed positions everywhere. Your notes, journal entries and credit ledger are kept separately and are never overwritten.

02 Accounts & Privacy

Your data is private by design. Two things make that real:

Account de-identification

ThetaTracker never stores or displays your full broker account number. When it syncs it keeps only the last four digits for labeling, so screenshots, screen-shares, and demos stay safe.

The Accounts manager 🗂️ header

If you trade more than one account, the 🗂️ Accounts button in the header lets you:

• Switch between accounts — each keeps its own positions, history, ledger, and journal. The active account drives the whole app; switching reloads it into that book.
• Rename an account to something meaningful (e.g. "Roth — Income").
• Color each account with its own accent — it tints the header switcher and the account's identity so you always know which book you're in. Pick a color in Settings → Accounts. The color is purely a visual cue; it's never tied to your broker number.
• Remove an account entirely when you no longer need it.

The 🌐 All Accounts tab

With two or more accounts, a 🌐 All Accounts tab appears next to the Dashboard — a read-only combined overview of every book at once:

• Combined totals — net liq, premium, theta, and Earned Today summed across all accounts.
• Per-account breakdown — BP %, delta, and net liq shown per account, never blended (a combined BP % across a margin account and an IRA would be meaningless).
• Every position grouped by account, color-coded.

It's read-only on purpose — to act on a position, switch into its account. A fully interactive combined view is planned for when live API data arrives.

03 The Dashboard

The dashboard leads with the Earned Today income strip, then your vitals, income campaign, department health, and live charts — all on one screen.

Earned Today — the income view

The first thing on your dashboard is the income strip — four numbers that measure how your engine is actually doing, with Net Liq demoted below them as context.

Under the four cards is a scorecard row: Theta today and Market today (the two halves of Earned Today, Weekly Income only), Day P&L and Net Liq for the whole account, and Return on Account — roll credits banked divided by Net Liq. Market today and Day P&L need the P/L Day column in your export; without it they show a dash and say so.

Vitals

Across the top: Net Liq, Buying Power used, portfolio Delta, Protection Coverage, and Theta/day. Coverage is the share of your short-put exposure covered by your long puts — your Weekly Income long inventory plus any Portfolio Protection legs. Enter your broker's actual available buying power in Settings to show it exactly, or leave it blank to estimate from Net Liq.

Your income campaign

Department Health

A tile per department — Weekly Income, Protection, Other Income, Leaps, Stock — showing whether each is populated and healthy, so problems surface before you go digging.

Between Protection and Other Income sits the Protection Check tile. It shows what your whole book would lose if the market gapped down (10% to start) as dollars and a share of the account, against the loss limit you set (15% to start). Green means adequate. Red shows how much you are over the limit, how many more protection spreads would bring you back inside, what they would cost, and whether volatility makes it a cheap time to buy. Click it to open the Market Drop Check. The gap, the limit and the other settings are on the Protection check in Roll Choices and New Position (see section 06).

Charts

Four live charts sit right on the dashboard. See Charts for the full rundown.

04 Weekly Income — The Engine

This is where the strategy lives. Weekly Income tracks your short puts (the income) and your long puts (the protection inventory) side by side.

• Short puts show their credit, current mark, P/L Open, delta, theta, days to expiration, and a status badge — roll today, roll this week, or comfortable — driven by your roll-timing settings.
• "Net If Rolled" shows where you'd stand after rolling, so the decision is numeric, not a guess.
• Close At lets you set a profit target on a position; it now applies to long legs as a target too.
• Long puts are your standing protection inventory, tracked so you always know your coverage against the short-put liability.

05 New Positions & Routing

Every position you sync waits for you in 📥 New Positions until you give it a home — nothing is filed automatically, so nothing ever lands in the wrong place. Route each one to where it belongs:

• Short & long puts → Weekly Income (your core engine).
• Credit spreads, iron condors, strangles and straddles → Other Income.
• Long-dated long calls → Leaps.
• Protective positions that pay off if the market falls (long puts, put spreads) → Protection.
• Stock shares → Stock.

Each item in New Positions has a Route → control. Pick a department and it files instantly. The choice is remembered — that position routes itself on every future import — and every department row also carries a Move → control so you can re-file anything later. To clear or fix a routing, use the 🔀 Routing Manager in the header.

Grouping a trade's legs together

Within any department you can cluster related positions into named groups, so the legs of one trade sit together for review. Every position row has a ⊕ group button: tap it, then pick an existing group or name a new one (for example Condor — SPX Jun). The table then shows that group under its own header with a leg count and a net subtotal, and anything ungrouped sits beneath.

• Other Income is the prime case — gather the four legs of an iron condor, or both legs of a credit spread, under one header and manage the structure as a unit.
• Weekly Income, Protection, and Leaps support it too — group by campaign, by underlying, or however you review.

Grouping is manual, it's yours, and it's remembered across syncs — the same discipline as routing.

06 Protection & the Protection Sizer

Protection is your defensive layer. Route protective legs here from New Positions (or log them manually for off-broker legs); routed legs show live and auto-clear when they close. Everything is tracked against your short-put liability so coverage is always visible.

Coverage & "fully paid"

• Coverage is measured on a notional basis — strike × contracts — and credits all your long-put cover: your Weekly Income long-put inventory plus any legs routed to Portfolio Protection, measured against your total short-put exposure (capped at 100%). It reads to one decimal and never rounds up to a false 100% while a gap remains.
• The "fully paid" tracker measures how far collected credits have gone toward financing your protection. It's tracked at the portfolio level rather than per-position, because rolling changes a position's OCC symbol and breaks automatic lineage.

The Protection Sizer

Tell the Sizer how much of your portfolio you want covered and it tells you exactly how many contracts to buy:

• For a single long put, it sizes against the strike notional.
• For a bear put spread, it sizes by the spread's payout width — (long strike − short strike) × 100 — because that, not the long strike, is what the spread can actually pay out.

It reports two numbers: Gap Coverage (the percent of your target the structure covers) and the structure's Max Payout (for a spread) or Notional Covered (for a long put). Then Build hands the sized structure to the Trade Builder with the right contract count.

The Protection check & the Market Drop Check

Roll Choices and New Position carry a Protection check above their results. It reprices your whole book for a market gap (10% to start), compares the loss with a limit you set as a percent of the account (15% to start), and says Adequate or Not adequate. When it is not adequate it prices one protection spread (long put at the money, 50 points wide, about 90 days), tells you how many more you need and the buying power they tie up, and whether volatility is low enough to make it a cheap time to buy. On New Position it includes the trade you are building. A button opens New Position as a debit put spread ready to search.

Tools › Market Drop Check shows the same repricing for eight market moves from −20% to +10%, in dollars and as a percent of the account, repriced right now and held to expiry. It reads the positions already loaded and places nothing.

Market Drop Check also gives a verdict against your loss limit, using the same fall and limit as the Protection check. Roll Watch now has Guided, Explore and Full control levels of its own.

07 Other Income

Other Income is for your defined-risk and premium trades outside the core engine — put and call credit spreads, iron condors, and strangles or straddles, short or long. Route the legs here from New Positions (or log them manually for off-broker legs); routed legs show live and auto-clear when they close. Each leg tracks its premium, current mark, P/L Open, days to expiration, and a Close At profit target. Use the ⊕ group button to cluster a structure's legs under one header — see Grouping a trade's legs together.

08 LEAP / Leaps

The Leaps department holds your long-dated long calls — anything dated at or beyond your LEAP threshold (180 days by default, adjustable in Settings) — plus any covered calls you write against them. Route long-dated long calls here from New Positions; the LEAP threshold is what flags a call as a Leaps candidate.

09 Stock

Stock holds your shares — long or short — with average cost, current market value, and open P/L. Shares land in 📥 New Positions when you import; route them here and they appear in the Stock tab.

10 Wheel

The Wheel Strategy tab is in beta. Campaigns build automatically from the positions you route to it, grouped by ticker. It is being shaped by user feedback, so if you run the wheel, tell us what you need.

11 Trade Builder

Trade Builder walks you through any trade, step by step, and ends with a broker-ready order ticket.

1. Pick a type — put credit spread, iron condor, strangle, covered call, roll, and more.
2. Enter parameters — strikes, contracts, target credit or debit. Expiration fields use a calendar picker: click the date field and choose.
3. Pre-flight check — it tests the trade against your live portfolio: delta impact, buying power, duplicate strikes — so you catch problems before the order, not after.
4. Order ticket — a clean, copy-ready ticket for tastytrade or thinkorswim with every leg spelled out.

The Protection Sizer lives here too, for sizing downside insurance precisely.

Trade Builder now sits inside the Tools tab, alongside Roll Choices and Diagnostics. Every shortcut that used to open it still works.

12 Roll Choices

Roll Choices ranks the rolls available on a position you already hold. It searches a grid of strikes against expirations, applies the criteria you set, and shows you what survived and what did not. Find it under Tools › Roll Choices.

It has two modes, and they answer different questions.

Both modes work on short puts and short calls. A call spread is the mirror of a put spread, not a special case: for puts the long sits below as a floor, for calls it sits above as a cap, and every width, requirement and direction figure flips accordingly.

A ⚑ Find rolls button also appears on any Weekly Income short that has crossed into defense territory. The button appearing is itself the signal: it opens the panel with that position already loaded and every field filled in from your live account.

1. Pick the position, and check the long it was paired with — the panel finds the other leg within the same department and shows you which one it chose. If that pairing is wrong, every width and requirement figure below it is wrong too, so correct the Long put floor before going further. A short with no long in its department is still searchable; it is flagged as undefined risk and you enter the bound by hand.
2. Choose which leg moves — Which leg moves, short or long. Choosing the long hides the credit and delta controls entirely, because neither applies to buying protection; what replaces them is value per dollar.
3. Set your criteria — credit/debit, buying power freed, and the delta band. Each one switches on to filter or off to leave the decision with you, and its value still shows on every row either way. Nominate one as the lead and it sorts the results.
4. Find rolls — every candidate is priced at the bid and ask, not the midpoint, so what you see is a price a fill can honour. Mid is shown alongside but never ranked on.
5. Read the top row, then read the rejections — rejected candidates stay on screen, muted, each with its reason. That is where the engine tells you what your book will not permit.

The delta band is the gate that matters, and this is the part worth understanding. A roll up and far enough out can collect enough time premium to show a healthy credit and a healthy freed-buying-power figure while quietly pushing your short-put delta to 0.42. It passes the credit-and-buying-power test and is still stopped by the delta band. If you are ever tempted to override a delta above band rejection because the freed number looks good, that is what you would be overriding.

Which expirations it looks at

Every expiration the engine considers costs a real request to the quote vendor, so the set is chosen rather than swept. Duration ceiling (days) decides how far out it looks — 150 by default — and Max chains to load caps how many it will actually pay for, 14 by default. Above that cap the list is sampled and the footer tells you how many of how many were used.

Rolls to an earlier expiration are shown, with the days as a negative and a warning that they shorten duration. That is not a defensive roll — it collects less and buys no time — but it is how a position opened months out gets brought back onto a weekly cadence. It is labelled rather than hidden so you can tell the two apart.

Reading the badges

Four statuses: credit + BP freed cleared everything you asked for and pays a credit and frees buying power; accepted cleared everything you asked for but does not pay a credit and free buying power — a deliberate debit, most often; minimal buying power relief cleared everything but frees almost nothing next to the best available, usually a pure roll-out; rejected failed something, and the reason is printed beside it.

The reasons worth reading are delta above band (the dangerous direction), delta below band, and the liquidity or margin-cap vetoes. Other flags describe the trade rather than reject it: inverted means negative width — a debit spread; net debit · modelled warns that an inverted requirement is modelled rather than quoted and brokers differ; and ⚠ shortens duration marks a roll to an earlier expiration.

If tightened criteria leave nothing, the panel shows the nearest misses with how far outside each sits, so an empty answer still tells you something.

Roll Choices does not place orders. Take the roll you choose to your broker, then record it with ↻ Roll or Log Roll so the campaign's cumulative credit stays accurate.

A printable study guide — eighteen parts covering both modes, the formulas, the criteria and guards, the expiration surface and the scoring — is in your project folder as ThetaTracker_Pro_Roll_Choices_Guide.pdf, alongside the HTML version.

13 Your Trade History

Your transaction record comes in with 🔄 Sync. There is no file to export and nothing to import.

• tastytrade: the first sync for each account reaches back to 1 January. Later syncs look back 90 days.
• Other brokers: the history is whatever your connection returns.
• Overlapping ranges are safe. Entries are deduplicated.
• The journal detects and groups your rolls, which feeds roll-capture numbers and Roll Cost.
• If a trade is missing, press 🔄 Sync again. Today's fills only arrive on a manual Sync.

14 Trade Journal & Taxes

Your Trade Journal is both a trading diary and a head start on tax season.

• A year-to-date strip up top, then a month-by-month record of activity.
• The Newest first button puts the latest month on top and the latest trade on top inside each month. Each row keeps its own running net.
• A market-events log to capture what the market did and what you were thinking, in the moment.
• A monthly summary you write yourself — and it persists across syncs, because it's your record, not the broker's.
• An annual tax summary with a monthly breakdown and a print button for your accountant.

15 Charts

Four live charts on your dashboard, fully configurable.

• Per-chart timeframes — 5-minute, 1-hour, daily — that refresh on their own (fast charts each minute, longer ones every few minutes).
• Indicators via the gear: moving averages, RSI, the squeeze, ATR bands — toggle, set periods, pick colors.
• Templates — set one chart up the way you like and apply it to the others in a click.
• Fullscreen for the complete chart with RSI and squeeze panes below.
• 🔍 Find Symbol — search by company or ticker to get the exact symbol, then copy it into a chart slot.

16 Settings

Tune the app to your trading. Everything saves the instant you change it.

• Calibrate from my history — reads your imported trades and suggests three values: a Roll Watch cost limit (what your long-put rolls really cost per contract per week), an estimated monthly long roll cost, and the weekly income you actually collected. Pick a look-back period, then press Use this on a line, or Use all of the above. Nothing changes until you press a button.
• Tabs — untick any tab you do not use to hide it from the bar. Dashboard, Tools and Settings always stay. The choice is saved in this browser, and ticking the box brings the tab back.
• Income goals — your weekly target and conservatism factor.
• Risk thresholds — buying-power warning, delta comfort zone, minimum and target protection coverage.
• Roll timing — what counts as "roll today" vs. "roll this week," and your long-put warning window. "Roll today" can be set all the way down to 0 days.
• Department names — show your own words on the tabs, the move menu and the lists. Only the label changes.
• LEAP threshold — the days-to-expiration cutoff that marks a long call as a Leaps candidate when you route it.
• Account profile — broker, primary underlying, and account type.

17 Keeping Your Data Safe

This is the most important habit in the whole app. Your journal is saved in this browser, and a copy is kept with your sign-in. A backup file you download yourself is still the safest copy, and it is easy. A single backup file captures all of your accounts at once.

1. Back up — the quickest way is the 💾 Backup button in the header: one click, downloads everything for all accounts. The same control lives in Settings → Data Management as Download Backup. Do it regularly: before clearing data, before switching computers, after any big session.
2. Restore from Backup brings everything back exactly as it was — perfect for moving to a new device or recovering.
3. The Clear / Reset controls give you a fresh start when you want one. Always download a backup first.

On sign-out, if you have unsaved work and haven't backed up recently, the app offers a one-click backup before it signs you out — so leaving never costs you data.

The Accounts manager (🗂️ in the header) is part of this too — switch, rename, or remove accounts, each with its own data, all kept de-identified.

18 Quick Reference

Where does each position go?

Everything lands in 📥 New Positions first — you route each position once, and it's remembered. Typical homes:

Common questions

Is my data sent anywhere? It is saved in your browser, and a copy is kept with your sign-in so it can follow you to another device. The Privacy page has the details. Back it up regularly.

Where did the Hedge department go? It was merged into Protection. Income spreads go in Other Income.

My long puts are in Weekly Income. Should they be in Protection? No. Keep the long puts that go with your weekly shorts in Weekly Income. Roll Choices only pairs a short with a long in the same department.

A cost or price looks wrong on a position I have not rolled. What do I do? Click its Sold For or Original Cost cell and type your own price per share.

I changed a setting. Do I need to save? No. Settings save the moment you change them.

Can I rename the departments? Yes, in Settings under Department Names.

How do I keep a multi-leg trade together? Use the ⊕ group button on any position row to put the legs under one named header — see Grouping a trade's legs together.

Are the chart quotes real-time? SPX, XSP, VIX and RUT are live. Other symbols can be delayed about 15 minutes. Use your broker for executable prices.